We're celebrating the 20th anniversary of one of the great classic baseball card sets, 1988 Topps. We're going through all 792 cards one by one, posting bits about what makes the card awesome and cool stats about the player or team featured on the card. We're also posting the 1988 Topps Traded set!

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

#51 Orioles Leaders

Why this card is awesome: Isn't it obvious? Because you've got 2 HOFers for the price of 1 on the front! That bumps our count up to 9 so far in the set.

Cool stat: Remember the beginning of the 1988 season? The Orioles and Braves both started the year with long losing streaks. The Braves had a 10-game slide, although the Orioles' reached 21 games. Relive the glory by checking out their schedule here. If you scroll down a bit, you can see all those minus signs in a row. Maybe this explains why neither Murray nor Ripken looks very confident in the photo above.

4 comments:

83F's autograph attainability rating (10 easily attainable and 0 being impossible): "2" Cal Ripken is part owner of a minor league baseball team and can be occasionally seen there. Probably only signs for the corporate sponsors.

In 1988 my cable system picked up the O's TV channel, so I got to watch those games. After a while, it was really embarrassing. I remember a game they had won, until the end and Frank White hit a shallow hump-backed fly into left field that the left fielder didn't even make an effort on that brought in the winning run. It's hard to imagine that Cals Sr. & Jr., Eddie Murray and Frank Robinson were associated with that embarrassing streak.